Trump World Grab-Bag--A Collection

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Donald Trump and the Classy Divide

There is a moment where, if you are at all a careful person, when you understand that "class" is often used as a substitute for "dignity". Or "honor". Donald Trump constitutes, if "class" is determined as a measure of wealth, by far one of America's classiest people. He is the representative of the 1%. If not the .01%. In the above picture, for those who can't view images, he is signing the upper chest area of a middle-aged woman because why not? And someone behind her is brandishing a copy of Trump's latest book Crippled America. (We do not generally refer to disabled persons as "crippled" anymore, so his use for that description of this country is pretty much repellent to thinking folks, as well.)

He is so good at declaring various people "losers". I begin to wonder how he ever finds any of us to be winners. But in the meanwhile--he is an actual lowbrow? I mean, money can't pave his actual cognitive lacks with gold, platinum, or even borrowed merit. Who signs the upper tit? Where is this good optics?

That's the whole point. It's very good optics among a very large number of our fellow citizens. People who hate and fear. People who have been raised on ignorance, indoctrinated into a tribe of victimization, educated at the feet of bigotry. Violent people who believe that nuance is weakness, and compromise is failure.

They are us, and they want nothing so badly as to see an end to our democracy, a segregation of our diversity, the strangulation of our compassion. They are the worst of us, our goateed Spock, and if they are not winning, they are at least not losing...

I've always thought the most vulgar thing about the "Obama-hate" was the insinuation that respecting other peoples' cultures was suddenly a form of lowkey treason--like if he bowed to a Japanese official, he was just giving away the store instead of, basically, offering a completely appropriate greeting. Good manners was suddenly treated like a disgrace.

So now we have the "short-fingered vulgarian" displaying not merely a non-PC aspect, but the kind of "Ugly American" values that make the US look like jag-offs on the world-scene. It's appalling.

(My understanding is that The Donald hates this term--but ankles at the "short-fingered" half of the slight, not the "vulgarian" half. He's actually sent photos of his fingers to the author of that phrase, Graydon Carter, as if allowing the "short-fingered" statement to stand was a proxy to some other anatomical analog. If nothing else were needed for proof of the "vulgarian" part, well, as the kids said 20 years ago--Whoot, there it is.)